Throughout the period when Freud wrote his major works, various translations and editions, differing widely in the accuracy of their texts and the quality of their content, made their appearance. Increasingly, as the body of Freud's work achieved commanding stature, the need arose for a definitive and uniformly authentic English-language edition of all his writings. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud was undertaken to achieve this goal. The work is under the general editorship of James Strachey, and he himself made new translations of many of the writings, supervising the emendation of others and contributing valuable notes, both bibliographical and explanatory. The result is to place this edition in a position of unquestioned supremacy over all other existing versions-which
are in fact rendered obsolete.